In addition to various analyses meant to investigate the items listed above, and whose results will be described below, importance has been given to surveys and excavations. Noteworthily, we excavated an open-air site in Burgundy: the site of La Mouillée proved to be the first stratified site in open air context for Quina Mousterian (most Quina sites are shelters and caves). Several sites that were subject to excavations in the past were searched for intact remnants of archaeological layers but the results were either negative or excavations are currently hampered by unsatisfactory security conditions.
Analyses of lithic assemblages have demonstrated that the Quina Mousterian in SW France is far from being as homogeneous as previously thought, with the Périgord and Charentes regions of France yielding rather strong disparities. Assemblages in Burgundy, Spain and Italy, are much more closely related to the Charentes industry than that of Périgord, even although the latter zone was considered to be part of the Quina core area. Lithic objects in Quina contexts sometimes travelled across several hundreds of kilometres, helping us to connect territories.
When looking at animal remains, it appeared that the makers of Quina Mousterian in Jonzac, who killed large numbers of reindeers during seasonal hunts during migration of the herbivores during fall, happened to use bone as raw material for the production of tools. This is a first (if we except the Chagyrskaya cave, in the Altaï) in the Neanderthal world, and yet we already expect to find similar evidence in other Quina contexts. More precisely, the novelty does not lie in the use of bone as is, but in the manufacturing of tools by knapping in a similar fashion as that implemented on lithics. In other words, animal bones represented for the makers of Quina Mousterian a raw material – obviously with very distinct properties compared to stone. Still in Jonzac, a site previously thought to be devoted to reindeer hunting, it now appears that horses were hunted in significant quantities, so that the mass of meat from the 8 horses is equivalent to that from the 28 reindeer identified. There also appear to have been differences in treatment between horse and reindeer, most notably in the number of anatomical connections (clearly more abundant on the reindeer), suggesting more intense butchery on the horse. Data on butchery gestures obtained from other archaeological sites also point to a more complex subsistence economy for Quina groups than previously imagined.
As far as dating is concerned, thus far our efforts have focussed on sampling and methodological advances; we have now demonstrated that the uncertainties associated with luminescence ages may be reduced by a factor 2 thanks to new mathematical models; namely, whereas one used to have ~5-10% uncertainties on a measured age, we may now get to ~2-3% - which is important to decipher climate-human interactions in the Neanderthal world.
